Interviewing? Don’t Be Passive — Have a Point of View!

I’m not sure where or when it happened, but at some point along the highway of history, society seems to have decided that the best way to select somebody for a job was to bring them in, ask them a bunch of canned questions, and listen to a bunch of canned (or at least shopworn) answers.  In fact, you can turn on CNN at almost any given moment and observe top-level cabinet appointees and judges acting this way, attempting to land coveted positions by playing it safe, avoiding straight answers, and coming across as “non-offensively” as possible.  This behavior inevitably triggers my gag reflex.  You?

While this technique may arguably work in the halls of government, however, it almost never works in the private sector.  Passivity doesn’t sell.  Every company I encounter seems to be looking for people who are confident, engaging, smart, and willing to put themselves out there — visibly and vocally — in order to demonstrate the quality of their ideas and expertise.  So if your interviewing experience to date has mainly involved sitting in front of a desk, politely answering questions, there’s a good chance you’re not registering strongly enough to be a serious contender.

Expressing your professional “point of view” in a hiring discussion becomes even more critical, of course, with each rung you attempt to take up the corporate ladder.  If you’re being considered for a top leadership position, for example, it will be imperative to capture the employer’s imagination with specific ideas, thoughts, and wisdom about how you can address the company’s problems and successfully achieve their goals.  What incredible secrets have you learned about managing companies through periods of intense change?  How do you make sure you hire the right people?  How do you get the best out of your direct reports — or get multiple teams and departments to work in tandem, despite turf battles and competing priorities?  These are the things that your next employer is dying to hear.  They desperately need them, after all, or they likely wouldn’t be talking with you!

This same dynamic also applies to anybody who is targeting an SME (Subject Matter Expert) position within an organization, such as the top marketing job, financial post, or operations role.  Remember, they’re hiring you (ostensibly) because they don’t currently have the answers and expertise they need in house — and are eagerly hoping you can supply them!  So while you should use a respectful tone at all times, don’t let modesty or propriety prevent you from expressing your own strong opinions about how you’d approach the company’s problems or where you think they might be going wrong with their current efforts.  If you’re interviewing for a Director of Marketing role, for instance, don’t be afraid to tell the company what you really think of their current website, collateral, and other materials, even if this feedback might not be highly favorable.  Sure, they might disagree with you, but they’ll at least respect you for having a point of view, and you’ll be exponentially more MEMORABLE than all of the other people they’ve met with who are trying to skate by with lazy, contrived, politically-correct answers.

Ultimately, there’s a huge difference between playing to win and playing not to lose in the interviewing process — and if you’re following the latter strategy, and always trying to tell the interviewer what they want to hear, your chances of success won’t be very promising!

Can You Solve an Employer’s Problems? Prove It!

Without question, one of the most important concepts professionals today need to grasp, in order to maintain a strong level of marketability/employability, is the idea that what they are selling to employers is not their skills, experience, education, or past accomplishments — but the perception that they can solve future problems for employers in rapid, cost-effective fashion.

Seems simple, I know, but I’d have to say that the root cause of most job search failure is directly related to this principle and a failure to understand its implications.  The resumes that fall the flattest, for example, are those that concentrate entirely on past accomplishments and job duties instead of focused, future solutions.  Along similar lines, the interview candidates who struggle to land offers are those who wax at length about all the great things they did for their past organizations, but display little curiosity about the needs and challenges of their potential future employer.  Simply put, no hiring manager is going to pay you for the things you did for somebody else — and unless you can create a compelling vision of how you are going to make THEIR organization better/stronger/more profitable, they’ll hold on to their cash until they find the person (or piece of software, or temp worker, or vendor…) who can!

So identifying the specific problems you are capable of and passionate about solving for companies is the requisite first step to career success.  But let’s move beyond that aspect for a second and talk instead about the second hurdle one has to clear, which is proving that you are the best available solution to these problems — in an age where companies have thousands of other candidate resumes available at the click of a mouse.  How do you prove you’ve got what it takes?  How do you compel them to make you a job offer, versus holding out for somebody who is perhaps even more capable to come along?

The key to this, I believe, is to understand the primary types of “proof” that job hunters are able to offer to employers and to then make the best possible case you can by weaving together these elements:

– Skills:  You demonstrate that you possess certain specialized hard/soft skills required for success
– Experience:  You show you have a track record of solving similar problems, ideally in similar industries
– Education:  You possess certifications/degrees/training that are highly relevant to the role in question

Without question, the above three criteria are the ones that the job market APPEARS to be built upon (just study any published job description) and are the factors most conventionally asked for and accepted by employers as reliable “evidence” that the candidate has what it takes to get the job done.  If you therefore have a great deal of strength in these areas, relative to your career targets, you should end up doing pretty well out there in your search.  Those candidates who don’t have the perfect pedigree in these three areas, however, need to adjust their strategy and rely instead on a second set of viable “proof points” in order to demonstrate their problem-solving abilities:

– Passion:  You demonstrate your tremendous energy/enthusiasm for tackling the challenges in question
– Ideas:  You capture the employer’s imagination with fresh thinking, keen insights, and brilliant ideas
– Confidence: You project unwavering conviction about your ability to complete the tasks at hand
– Contacts:  You mention key relationships you’ve built that can help achieve the desired job results

Lastly, there’s one final element of proof that trumps all the above and explains why 70-80% of all hiring the marketplace is actually NOT based strictly on skills, experience, and resume considerations:

– Personal Referrals:  There is no more powerful way of convincing somebody you’re going to be a great hire than by having people you know, and whom the employer trusts, tell them about your capabilities and endorse you as a smart, responsible, hard-working employee.

This last element, luckily, is the great equalizer that prevents the job market from being a merciless meritocracy and from all of us being condemned to stick with a single rigid career path throughout our entire lives.  Networking is king and personal referrals/endorsements are still the most trusted and reliable form of evidence employers look for when making hiring decisions.  Just ask yourself: if you were going to hire a contractor to complete a $100,000 remodel on your house, would you hire the firm with the fanciest brochure and slickest website or would you lean, instead, toward the company a trusted friend keeps raving about that did a fantastic, professional, and affordable job on their remodeling project? The job market works the exact same way — and for the exact same reasons.  Use them to your advantage!

The Greatest Weakness Question: How to Nail It

Ah, yes.  The infamous “what is your greatest weakness?” interview question.  Despite thousands of links on the Internet regarding interview preparation, and countless books on the subject, many people still botch this classic employer inquiry.  So we’ll restate the advice from our workbook, which is our belief that candidates should attempt to score lots of authenticity points on this question and provide a very thoughtful and honest answer.  Not sure what weakness to focus on?  Here’s the secret: Just take one of your greatest strengths, flip it around, and discuss how it could be (or has been) used against you and caused you workplace grief in the past.

Here are several representative examples of this technique in action:

– Are you extremely talented at building teams, increasing retention rates, and creating a trusting and empowered work atmosphere?  If so, then you more than likely have trusted too much, on occasion, and had employees abuse your good nature.  Explain how you’ve learned to guard against this tendency and have learned to be fair, but tough, to avoid getting taken advantage of by your subordinates.

– Are you highly analytical and good at seeing problems from all angles?  If so, we’d predict that you’ve been accused of being “resistant to change” or “too slow to make decisions” from time to time.  Talk about the times that this issue has caused friction during your career and how you’ve learned to apply your analytical skills more selectively, or to disengage them completely, when circumstances require it.

– Are you a perfectionist who pays tremendous attention to detail?  If so, we’d bet dollars to doughnuts there have been times when this tendency has slowed you down, alienated your co-workers, or placed you in a martyrship role working many extra unpaid hours.   Should this be the case, explain how you’ve learned to prioritize better and to evaluate when “good” might be “good enough” more effectively.

Once you’ve disclosed your own authentic weakness, and provided some context about how it has gotten in your way on a few occasions, don’t dilly-dally — move on to describe how you’ve learned to compensate for it and guard against it limiting your effectiveness in certain situations!

Wisdom Sells. Experience? Not So Much…

This past month, we’ve had a strong surge of clients going through the interview process with various companies around town, so we’ve been heavily engaged in helping people prepare for these opportunities through interviewing strategy sessions and “mock interview” role-playing simulations.

Along the way, however, we’ve noticed a significant pattern forming.  While our clients were presenting themselves well in a variety of respects, such as acing the common questions and listening carefully to the employer’s needs, they were universally failing in one critical aspect.  They were talking at length about the “experience” they had to offer, in the form of past jobs and accomplishments, but were sharing nary a peep about the “wisdom” this experience gave them in the form of lessons learned, insights gained, and increased future effectiveness.

While this may sound trivial, keep in mind that wisdom is perhaps the single greatest weapon that older, more experienced job seekers have at their disposal.  In today’s dog-eat-dog hiring world, where age discrimination is a constant concern, employers are constantly wrestling with the decision of whether to forego hiring a more experienced candidate in favor of a younger, less experienced candidate who they can train from scratch and who is likely (so the stereotype goes) to work harder, faster, and cheaper.   For this reason, older workers need to think hard about how they are going to overcome this perception and showcase the unique value they can offer over less experienced candidates.  Again, we maintain that this value comes primarily in the form of “wise insights” that have been earned the old-fashioned way, through time and experience — but you have to put some real thought into it.  It’s not enough to simply rattle off war stories or trudge through 20-30 years of past work history.

As an example of the types of insights we feel fit the bill, one of our clients was recently called in to interview for a job where he would be managing the installation of a large new computer system at a local medical clinic.  If hired, he would be in charge of recruiting and leading a cross-functional team from multiple departments in order to pull the project off successfully.  When we first asked him to talk about his experience in this area, we got the standard shopworn litany of project management cliches, combined with an extensive monologue about related projects that he’d worked on in the past.  Not very compelling!  When we “rebooted” the exercise, however, and asked him a more focused question about what he’d learned as a result of these experiences, and what he felt the “secrets of success” were in such situations, he offered a much more intriguing insight.  He said that where most companies went wrong was that they picked people for these cross-functional teams based solely on their technical expertise, or longevity with the organization, instead of considering the depth of their interpersonal skills and whether or not they had a reputation as team players.  In his experience, it was far more important to build a team that could work well together than to ensure you had the absolutely most experienced people on board — and he had a specific way of interviewing potential team members that would accomplish this result without causing too much political or diplomatic strain within the organization.

Agree or disagree with this observation, you’ve got to at least admit that this latter response is much more interesting than the original answer that was offered, and that it clearly highlights the unique value that this candidate feels he can bring to the organization.  So when you’re getting ready for your next interview, don’t just memorize your resume and rattle off your work history.  Think hard about all of the valuable insights, shortcuts, and lessons you’ve learned over the years that never get taught in a textbook — these critical “pearls of wisdom” are what employers are looking for!

The Magic Words: “This Person Gets It!”

In terms of the overall job search process, interviewing continues to be (in our opinion) one of the most misunderstood aspects of the job hunting challenge, with many people still operating under the belief that interviews are designed to separate the “most qualified” individual from the rest.  In the real world, however, it’s virtually impossible to objectively rank people by paper-based qualifications.  Instead, companies invite a number of candidates in who meet the minimum education/experience requirements, then base their decision on which individual seems to best grasp their unique work culture, challenges, and ideal future vision of the position in question.

This being the case, many candidates end up completely missing the point of the interview and failing to capitalize on many significant opportunities to sell themselves.  For starters, it’s important to recognize that despite appearances, and the actual questions that might be asked, most hiring managers care next to nothing about your background and work history.  What do they care about?  Whether or not you are capable of providing them with profitable future solutions — and how quickly you can do it.  As a job seeker, therefore, you have to be extremely careful not to get caught telling war stories or rehashing your resume in the interview, unless you consistently tie these past achievements back to the expressed future needs of the hiring manager.

How do you know what these needs are, exactly?  That’s the other important part of the equation.  Don’t focus on “acing” the questions being asked or trying to rattle off one silver-tongued answer after another.  Focus instead on one thing and one thing alone — try to build the trust and rapport necessary to get the person across the desk to really open up and describe their vision of what the ideal person hired will be able to accomplish.  Like any great salesperson, be a great listener.  Ask insightful, intelligent questions.  And do as much homework as possible, in advance, so that you already come in with a strong sense of what the interviewer’s hot buttons and buying signals are likely to be.

When all is said and done, again, your actual qualifications will likely matter very little in terms of whether or not you end up receiving the job offer.  By the time you’re invited in for the interview, you’ve already been “prequalified” from your resume.  The difference therefore comes down to the interviewer’s perception of which candidate best understands their problems — and seems confident that they can solve them in the timeline and manner desired.  And ultimately, if you’re the candidate who best “gets it” in their eyes, guess what?  You’ll be the one hired!

Energy: The Foolproof Test

Did you know that there’s a simple “litmus test” that can accurately gauge the effectiveness of virtually any type of meeting that takes place between two individuals?

The test is this.  After any interview, networking conversation, or interpersonal interaction, ask yourself whether the meeting generated energy in both parties — or whether it depleted it.  In other words, when the interaction is finished, do the people who participated feel more excited and energized than when they started or do they feel tired, drained, and exhausted after the exchange?  Except in a few rare cases, this test will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not the meeting was a success.

Perhaps the most tactical application of this knowledge, from a job search standpoint, is to assess whether you’re doing your part to create this positive energy and to make conversations flow as smoothly as possible.  Are you prepared enough for the meetings you attend?  Do you bring fresh ideas and perspectives?  Are you holding up your end of the conversation or are you sitting back, displaying negative and intimidating body language, making it extremely difficult for the other person to get to know you?  If you already sense that some of these behaviors apply to you, it’s important that you take proactive steps to address the matter.  If you’re unable to connect with other people easily and build solid rapport, you’ll be at a major disadvantage in finding employment.

There are also people out there, unfortunately, who display these characteristics but appear completely unaware that they’re coming across this way.  In my private coaching practice, for instance, I have clients who are very engaging, and approachable, and we often go well beyond the scheduled appointment time (on my dime, of course!) because we’re creating good energy and making significant progress toward reaching the individual’s goals.  At the same time, however, I occasionally encounter clients who come across as closed, guarded, and non-responsive in our conversations.  Given my lack of masochistic tendencies, you can imagine that I tend to wrap up our sessions right on schedule!

So while the consequences of displaying closed and guarded behavior may be minimal in terms of the career coaching interaction, they are signs of an individual who is likely to run into major roadblocks in the interviewing, networking, and job hunting process.

For the most part, of course, I raise this issue directly with clients who make me “work hard” to get to know them or who come across as standoffish.  It’s part of my job to provide this objective feedback, and in many cases, the root cause doesn’t actually turn out to be arrogance — but a degree of shyness or insecurity, instead.  Whichever the case, however, it’s important to acknowledge the issue and work on it if it turns out to be a barrier to your success.  Unless you’re able to bring positive energy to the table, and create excitement in the people you’re conversing with, you’ll find yourself at a major disadvantage in both your job search as well as your ongoing career success.

Interviewing: Should You Mock It?

Let’s face it.  No matter what subject one considers, it’s tough to get good at most things in life without regular practice.  This reality applies not only to playing golf, or cooking gourmet meals, but also to the arena of employment interviewing.  In fact, we’ve found over the years that many job seekers significantly overestimate their ability to sell themselves to employers — until they find themselves in the hot seat for a killer job opportunity and learn the hard way that their confidence may have been been somewhat overinflated.

In reality, it isn’t hard to understand why many of today’s professionals fail to take the interview process as seriously as they should.  For starters, quite a few people we meet with were last hired during the mid-to-late Nineties during a historically uncharacteristic “seller’s market” where competition for jobs was light and the interview bar was low, low, low.  This is not the case today.  In addition, professionals who have worked steadily for the past 5-10 years or more often fail to take into consideration that their last interview was for a more junior job, at a lower salary.  Now that they have many years of additional experience, and will be targeting more senior positions, they will be facing a new level of competition in the interviewing process and will need to be prepared for a much stiffer challenge.

So what’s the best cure to interviewing overconfidence?  There’s no question about it: the solution is focused practice.  At Career Horizons, we recommend that all job seekers schedule an hour to go through a “mock interview” simulation with us where we can provide constructive feedback and evaluate the full spectrum of your presentation skills, ranging from your body language to your ability to build rapport and dialogue with the hiring manager across the table.  We’ll run you through many of the classic questions you’re likely to face, such as the dreaded “tell me about yourself” and “what’s your greatest weakness” queries, as well as challenge you with some job- and industry-specific questions related to your particular field.  When finished, we’ll share some immediate pointers and also provide you with written feedback about the parts of your interview that are most in need of improvement.

In the end, whether you go through a mock interviewing session with us or with a friend of yours who has done lots of hiring, you’ll find the exercise does wonders for your confidence and goes a long way to helping you make a positive “hire me” impression with potential employers!

Bloated Job Descriptions: An Interviewee’s Best Friend

At Career Horizons, we love the challenge of helping people train for the “biggest sales of their lives” in the form of their next competitive job interview.  And while there are many interviewing techniques that we offer up in our workbook, and through our coaching programs, one of the most obvious tips — that we rarely see practiced by candidates — is to take those long, unwieldy job advertisements we all hate and to put them to good use in preparing for the hiring conversation.

Remember, if a job qualification or responsibility has already been disclosed in an advertisement, it stands to reason that a few focused questions around this item are likely to be part and parcel of the employment discussion.  After all, the hiring manager has already indicated that the given topics are important to him or her — shouldn’t they therefore be the areas in which you concentrate your preparation efforts most heavily?  Seems logical, doesn’t it?  So prior to your next interview, we’d encourage you to spread the job description out in front of you, isolate each separate qualification/requirement listed, and gear up for success by asking yourself the following four questions:

1)  Do I know exactly what this qualification/responsibility is? (if not, do some homework…)
2)  Do I have a relevant example prepared to share from my own experience? (if not, come up with one…)
3)  Do I have something interesting and insightful to say about it? (if not, think hard until you do…)
4)  Am I ready to ask a compelling question back to the employer about this topic? (if not, prepare one…)

These steps may seem obvious, but time and time again we catch candidates trying to bluff their way through questions around specific job elements that were clearly disclosed, on paper, prior to the interview.  There’s just no excuse for this.  Additionally, if you’re job searching at the management level, you’ll be expected to bring some heavy-duty intellectual and leadership capital to the table — so make sure to show off the depth of your experience by arriving armed with poignant “words of wisdom” about each and every stated criterion of the job!

Cockiness Counts: Get a Little High on Yourself!

Brace yourself: I’m about to advocate a controversial position that I might live to regret later, if all of my clients really take it to heart!  I can’t help it, however.  After observing thousands of people as they venture out into the job market, and experience dramatically different degrees of success, I’ve had to admit that one particular personality trait — cockiness — seems to be strongly correlated with the ability to land quality, high-paying job offers in the current marketplace.

We all know the type.  Some of us may already, in fact, be the type.  The kind of person I’m talking about is the individual who seems a little too sure of themselves, a little too confident in their capabilities, and who might be pursuing titles and compensation levels that seem a little unrealistic in terms of their background, education, and credentials.  And yet, as much as we might wish otherwise, or tell ourselves that these people are in for a rude awakening, the truth (from my perspective, at least) is that such people often end up getting exactly what they ask for out in the job market!

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s a big difference between cockiness and arrogance.  If you push the self-confidence thing too far, to the point that you are out of touch with reality — or oblivious to the needs of those around you — the marketing edge suddenly evaporates.  But those people who can walk this line effectively seem to have a hypnotic effect on recruiters and employers.   In all probability, this is just one more spin on the psychological “we tend to want what we can’t have” principle where employers feel that if somebody stands up to them, and seems willing to walk away, then darn it — they must somehow be more qualified than those other candidates we’ve talked with who seem so nice, passive, respectful, and polite!  Additionally, a little cockiness might be a sign that people have the stockpile of self-assurance needed to take control of complex projects, challenges, and situations — and to fearlessly plow through the multiple barriers and obstacles that today’s business world tends to throw at organizations.

So in terms of your own effectiveness, ask yourself whether your “cockiness quotient” might need a bit of an upgrade.  Should you be more aggressive in the interview process and push back with tougher questions?  Should you promise you can solve certain problems, within certain timeframes, even if you can’t yet be 100% sure you can deliver the goods?  Should you ask for more money than the employer seems initially willing to pay, look them straight in the eye, and tell them you’ll be worth every penny of this higher salary — and more?  Food for thought, at the very least. As an impartial observer of this process, however, I promise you one thing: confidence usually sells!

Testing, Testing: Dealing With Pre-Hire Assessments

Speaking from experience, there are few things as costly or damaging to an organization as making a bad hiring decision — and having to extricate yourself from it.  Along these lines, companies today go the extra mile to minimize their risk throughout the hiring process and ensure that the final candidate will not only “play nicely with others” but provide an adequate return on investment.  They do this by scheduling multiple rounds of interviews, checking references, demanding work samples, showing favoritism to word-of-mouth candidates, and lastly, by running candidates through a wider variety of personality tests and assessments than ever before.

Many job seekers, however, continue to be surprised when asked to complete such an assessment, and this step of the hiring process often leads to sudden surges of panic and anxiety.  Fortunately or unfortunately, if you’re a job applicant, there’s almost no way to anticipate when such testing will be administered, and it’s even more difficult to predict which test will be used since there are literally hundreds of them available to today’s recruiters and hiring managers.  We therefore recommend that you adopt a simple two-part strategy when personality testing rears its head in the interviewing process.  First, take a deep breath, relax, and don’t try to outsmart the system or test.  While we’d never go so far as to claim every test is infallible, or even reasonably valid, worse results are likely to happen if you try to outsmart the instrument and represent yourself as somebody you are not.  It does you little good to convince the employer that you’re an unabashed extrovert if, instead, the idea of making cold calls or attending professional networking events make you cringe!

Secondly, in preparation for these scenarios, we’d encourage you to have something interesting to say about the testing process itself.  If you’ve used these types of assessments in the past, in your own career or management experience, discuss the instrument(s) that were used and their relative effectiveness in making good hires.  Compare notes with the interviewer about their own experience with such tests and how they selected the particular tool they’ve currently adopted.  Do a little research on the tool, as well, to find out more about it, and display a genuine curiosity in finding out your results so that you can then discuss their implications with the interviewer in terms of work style, teamwork, and cultural fit.  While these steps are no guarantee that your assessment results will pass muster and meet the interviewer’s parameters, you’ll at least open the topic up to discussion and impress them (in most cases) with your shared interest in the goal of applying such information effectively.

Love it or hate it, employment-based testing is likely here to stay given the continued fear that employers of making a hasty or improper hiring decision.  If you’re interested in more details about the types of tests used today and how to deal with them, check out a great article available on the Ask the Headhunter site at by clicking here.